The Natural History Museum/Alamy Stock Photo
By Sandrine Ceurstemont
KATSUHIKO HAYASHI is playing God. In his lab at Kyushu University in Fukuoka, Japan, he recently created eight baby mice using eggs made from reprogrammed mouse skin cells. Now he’s working his magic on the northern white rhino, a species so endangered there are just three individuals left, all with reproductive problems. And he has even bigger plans: he wants to use the technique to resurrect extinct animals.
De-extinction isn’t a new idea. But where early attempts owed more to Jurassic Park than to science, Hayashi and others are taking a more high-minded approach. They look at the fast-moving field of biotechnology and see its conservation potential. “Many animals are gone because of human error, so we need to use technology to recover them,” he says.
He has a point. With 100 or so species disappearing from the planet every day, we are living through one of the biggest mass extinctions ever. And the causes – from poaching to pollution to climate change – are down to us. At the same time, cutting-edge biotechnology, including genome sequencing, cloning and gene-editing tools like CRISPR, is allowing us to manipulate life. We are now on the verge of being able to undo extinctions, and researchers are racing to get there first. But while some foresee a thrilling new age of conservation and are urging conservationists to embrace it, others are horrified by the prospect of high-tech meddling with nature.
“De-extinction technologies won’t so much resurrect species as create new __life forms”
Even de-extinction’s greatest advocates admit that
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